Introduction from:

Distinction:
A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

by Pierre Bourdieu
©1984

Introduction

You said it, my good knight! There ought to be laws to
protect the body of acquired knowledge.
Take one of our good pupils, for example: modest
and diligent, from his earliest grammar classes he’s
kept a little notebook full of phrases.
After hanging on the lips of his teachers for twenty
years, he’s managed to build up an intellectual stock in
trade; doesn’t it belong to him as if it were a house, or
money?

Paul Claudel, Le soulier de satin, Day III, Scene ii

There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic. Sociology
endeavours to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods,
and their taste for them, are produced, and at the same time to describe the
different ways of appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a
particular moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the constitution of
the mode of appropriation that is considered legitimate. But one cannot fully
understand cultural practices unless ‘culture’, in the restricted, normative sense of
ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and
the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the
elementary taste for the flavours of food.
Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift
of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of
upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum
visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or
music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or
length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.

1

The relative weight of

home background and of formal education (the effectiveness and duration of
which are closely dependent on social origin) varies according to the extent to
which the different cultural practices are recognized and taught by the
educational system, and the influence of social origin is strongest—other things
being equal—in ‘extra-curricular’ and avant-garde culture. To the socially
recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or
periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes
to function as markers of ‘class’. The manner in which culture has been acquired
lives on in the manner of using it: the importance attached to manners can be

1

Bourdieu et al., Un art moyen: essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris,

Ed. de Minuit, 1965); P. Bourdieu and A. Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: les musées et leur
public (Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1966).

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understood once it is seen that it is these imponderables of practice which
distinguish the different—and ranked—modes of culture acquisition, early or
late, domestic or scholastic, and the classes of individuals which they
characterize (such as ‘pedants’ and mondains). Culture also has its titles of
nobility—awarded by the educational system—and its pedigrees, measured by
seniority in admission to the nobility.
The definition of cultural nobility is the stake in a struggle which has gone on
unceasingly, from the seventeenth century to the present day, between groups
differing in their ideas of culture and of the legitimate relation to culture and to
works of art, and therefore differing in the conditions of acquisition of which
these dispositions are the product

2

Even in the classroom, the dominant definition

of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and works of art favours those who
have had early access to legitimate culture, in a cultured household, outside of
scholastic disciplines, since even within the educational system it devalues
scholarly knowledge and interpretation as ‘scholastic’ or even ‘pedantic’ in
favour of direct experience and simple delight.
The logic of what is sometimes called, in typically ‘pedantic’ language, the
‘reading’ of a work of art, offers an objective basis for this opposition.
Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is, an
act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a
cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function
of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to
name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception. A
work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural
competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. The conscious or
unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of perception and
appreciation which constitutes pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition
for recognizing the styles characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and,
more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic
enjoyment presupposes. A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a
chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason. Not
having learnt to adopt the adequate disposition, he stops short at what Erwin
Panofsky calls the ‘sensible properties’, perceiving a skin as downy or lace-work

2

The word disposition seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the

concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions)—used later in this chapter. It
expresses first the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words
such as structure; it also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the
body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity or inclination. [The
semantic cluster of ‘disposition’ is rather wider in French than in English, but as this
note—translated literally—shows, the equivalence is adequate. Translator.] P. Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge UJniversity Press, 1977), p. 214,
n. 1.

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as delicate, or at the emotional resonances aroused by these properties, referring
to ‘austere’ colours or a ‘joyful’ melody. He cannot move from the ‘primary
stratum of the meaning we can grasp on the basis of our ordinary experience’ to
the ‘stratum of secondary meanings’, i.e., the ‘level of the meaning of what is
signified’, unless he possesses the concepts which go beyond the sensible
properties and which identify the specifically stylistic properties of the work.

3

Thus the encounter with a work of art is not ‘love at first sight’ as is generally
supposed, and the act of empathy, Einfühlung, which is the art-lover’s pleasure,
presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the
implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code.

4

This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts
the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of
legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to
favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the
acquisition.

5

The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education. This is

true of the mode of artistic perception now accepted as legitimate, that is, the
aesthetic disposition, the capacity to consider in and for themselves, as form
rather than function, not only the works designated for such apprehension, i.e.,
legitimate works of art, but everything in the world, including cultural objects
which are not yet consecrated—such as, at one time, primitive arts, or, nowadays,

3

E. Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance

Art’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, Doubleday, 1955), p. 28.

4

It will be seen that this internalized code called culture functions as cultural capital

owing to the fact that, being unequally distributed, it secures profits of distinction.

5

The sense of familiarity in no way excludes the ethnocentric misunderstanding which

results from applying the wrong code. Thus, Michael Baxandall’s work in historical
ethnology enables us to measure all that separates the perceptual schemes that now tend
to be applied to Quattrocento paintings and those which their immediate addressees
applied. The ‘moral and spiritual eye’ of Quattrocento man, that is, the set of cognitive
and evaluative dispositions which were the basis of his perception of the world and his
perception of pictorial representation of the world, differs radically from the ‘pure’ gaze
(purified, first of all, of reference to economic value) with which the modern cultivated
spectator looks at works of art. As the contracts show, the clients of Filippo Lippi,
Domenico Ghirlandaio or Piero della Francesca were concerned to get ‘value for money’.
They approached works of art with the mercantile dispositions of a businessman who can
calculate quantities and prices at a glance, and they applied some surprising criteria of
appreciation, such as the expense of the colours, which sets gold and ultramarine at the
top of the hierarchy. The artists, who shared this world view, were led to include
arithmetical and geometrical devices in their compositions so as to flatter this taste for
measurement and calculation; and they tended to exhibit the technical virtuosity which, in
this context, is the most visible evidence of the quantity and quality of the labour
provided; M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in
the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972).

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popular photography or kitsch—and natural objects. The ‘pure’ gaze is a
historical invention linked to the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic
production, that is, a field capable of imposing its own norms on both the
production and the consumption of its products.

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An art which, like all Post-

Impressionist painting, is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the
primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation demands
categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded
conditionally.
The pure intention of the artist is that of a producer who aims to be
autonomous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who tends to reject not
only the ‘programmes’ imposed a priori by scholars and scribes, but also—
following the old hierarchy of doing and saying—the interpretations
superimposed a posteriori on his work. The production of an ‘open work’,
intrinsically and deliberately polysemic, can thus be understood as the final stage
in the conquest of artistic autonomy by poets and, following in their footsteps, by
painters, who had long been reliant on writers and their work of ‘showing’ and
‘illustrating’. To assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of
which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than the ‘subject’, the
external referent, which involves subordination to functions even if only the most
elementary one, that of representing, signifying, saying something. It also means
a refusal to recognize any necessity other than that inscribed in the specific
tradition of the artistic discipline in question: the shift from an art which imitates
nature to an art which imitates art, deriving from its own history the exclusive
source of its experiments and even of its breaks with tradition. An art which ever
increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived
historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or
designated ‘reality’, but to the universe of past and present works of art. Like
artistic production, in that it is generated in a field, aesthetic perception is
necessarily historical, inasmuch as it is differential, relational, attentive to the
deviations (écarts) which make styles. Like the so-called naive painter who,
operating outside the held and its specific traditions remains external to the
history of the art, the ‘naive’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of
art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an
artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly
autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural
competence. This historical culture functions as a principle of pertinence which
enables one to identify, among the elements offered to the gaze, all the distinctive
features and only these, by referring them, consciously or unconsciously, to the

6

See P. Bourdieu, ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, L’Anneé Sociologique, 22 (1973),

49 126; and ‘Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, International Social
Science Journal, 20 (Winter 1968), 589-612.

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universe of possible alternatives. This mastery is, for the most part, acquired
simply by contact with works of art—that is, through an implicit learning
analogous to that which makes it possible to recognize familiar faces without
explicit rules or criteria—and it generally remains at a practical level; it is what
makes it possible to identify styles, i.e., modes of expression characteristic of a
period, a civilization or a school, without having to distinguish clearly, or state
explicitly, the features which constitute their originality. Everything seems to
suggest that even among professional valuers, the criteria which define the
stylistic properties of the ‘typical works’ on which all their judgements are based
usually remain implicit.
The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world,
which, given the conditions in which it is performed, is also a social separation.
Orteya y Gasset can be believed when he attributes to modern art a systematic
refusal of all that is ‘human’, i.e., generic, common—as opposed to distinctive, or
distinguished—namely, the passions, emotions and feelings which ‘ordinary’
people invest in their ‘ordinary’ lives. It is as if the ‘popular aesthetic’ (the
quotation marks are there to indicate that this is an aesthetic ‘in itself’ not ‘for
itself’) were based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life,
which implies the subordination of form to function. This is seen clearly in the
case of the novel and especially the theatre, where the working-class audience
refuses any sort of formal experimentation and all the effects which, by
introducing a distance from the accepted conventions (as regards scenery, plot
etc.), tend to distance the spectator, preventing him from getting involved and
fully identifying with the characters (I am thinking of Brechtian ‘alienation’ or
the disruption of plot in the nouveau roman). In contrast to the detachment and
disinterestedness which aesthetic theory regards as the only way of recognizing
the work of art for what it is, i.e., autonomous, selbständig, the ‘popular
aesthetic’ ignores or refuses the refusal of ‘facile’ involvement and ‘vulgar’
enjoyment, a refusal which is the basis of the taste for formal experiment. And
popular judgements of paintings or photographs spring from an ‘aesthetic’ (in
fact it is an ethos) which is the exact opposite of the Kantian aesthetic. Whereas,
in order to grasp the specificity of the aesthetic judgement, Kant strove to
distinguish that which pleases from that which gratifies and, more generally, to
distinguish disinterestedness, the sole guarantor of the specifically aesthetic
quality of contemplation, from the interest of reason which defines the Good,
working-class people expect every image to explicitly perform a function, if only
that of a sign, and their judgements make reference, often explicitly, to the norms
of morality or agreeableness. Whether rejecting or praising, their appreciation
always has an ethical basis.
Popular taste applies the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the ordinary
circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, and so performs a systematic
reduction of the things of art to the things of life. The very seriousness (or

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naivety) which this taste invests in fictions and representations demonstrates a
contrario that pure taste performs a suspension of ‘naive’ involvement which is
one dimension of a ‘quasi-ludic’ relationship with the necessities of the world.
Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation—literature, theatre,
painting—more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect
representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe
‘naively’ in the things represented. The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or
rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social
world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical
transgression becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents
the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes the bourgeois
denial of the social world to its limit. The detachment of the pure gaze cannot be
dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical
product of conditioning by negative economic necessities—a life of ease—that
tends to induce an active distance from necessity.
Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition,
there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and
sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself, no area in which the
stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over
matter, does not produce the same effects. And nothing is more distinctive, more
distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal
or even ‘common’ (because the ‘common’ people make them their own,
especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’
aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing
or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes
aesthetics to ethics.
In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose,
the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and
the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very
closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and,
consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic
of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the
classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish
themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the
distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective
classifications is expressed or betrayed. And statistical analysis does indeed show
that oppositions similar in structure to those found in cultural practices also
appear in eating habits. The antithesis between quantity and quality, substance
and form, corresponds to the opposition—linked to different distances from
necessity—between the taste of necessity, which favours the most ‘filling’ and
most economical foods, and the taste of liberty or luxury—which shifts the

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emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving, eating etc.) and tends to use
stylized forms to deny function.
The science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression
that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes
legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover the intelligible
relations which unite apparently incommensurable ‘choices’, such as preferences
in music and food, painting and sport, literature and hairstyle. This barbarous
reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption
abolishes the opposition, which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant,
between the ‘taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection’, and between facile
pleasure, pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, and pure pleasure, pleasure
purified of pleasure, which is predisposed to become a symbol of moral
excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation which defines the truly
human man. The culture which results from this magical division is sacred.
Cultural consecration does indeed confer on the objects, persons and situations it
touches, a sort of ontological promotion akin to a transubstantiation. Proof
enough of this is found in the two following quotations, which might almost have
been written for the delight of the sociologist:
‘What struck me most is this: nothing could be obscene on the stage of our
premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, sylphs,
sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity.’

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‘There are obscene postures: the stimulated intercourse which offends the
eye. Clearly, it is impossible to approve, although the interpolation of such
gestures in dance routines does give them a symbolic and aesthetic quality which
is absent from the intimate scenes the cinema daily flaunts before its spectators’
eyes . . . As for the nude scene, what can one say, except that it is brief and
theatrically not very effective? I will not say it is chaste or innocent, for nothing
commercial can be so described. Let us say it is not shocking, and that the chief
objection is that it serves as a box-office gimmick. . . . In Hair, the nakedness
fails to be symbolic.’

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The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—
enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation
of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined,
disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane.
That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and
deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.

Translated by Richard Nice

7

O. Merlin, ‘Mlle. Thibon dans la vision de Marguerite’, Le Monde, 9 December 1965.

8

F. Chenique, ‘Hair est-il immoral?’ Le Monde, 28 January 1970.